Since its creation over a decade ago, Mozilla has never had its own complete operating system. That's now about to change as Mozilla is ramping up its Boot to Gecko effort, which will enable Mozilla Firefox-powered phones. Gecko is the underlying rendering framework behind Firefox.

Today Mozilla announced that leading service providers, including Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom, are now supporting the Boot to Gecko (B2G) effort. Additionally, mobile chip vendor Qualcomm is collaborating in the effort, which is all about opening up the mobile web.

"For the first time the capabilities of HTML5 and the open Web have been fully leveraged to create an entirely new mobile platform," Carlos Domingo, Director of Product Development & Innovation at Telefónica Digital, said in a statement. "From our experience in Latin America we know that a huge part of the market is not being catered [to] by current smartphones."